[Matt Q]

Hi Richard,

I enjoyed this. The unsuccessful garden-knights with baffles and spinners, and their Sun Tzu quotes, burnt out and broken, but unable to let go, and drinking in the broken-down Knight and Drey. The title / pub name is clever, echoing "Night and Day" and setting up the garden-owner versus squirrel dynamic. I also like the hint the the "you" (the reader / narrator) might be a squirrel, given the "scurry past". This is my favourite of those you've posted so far.

FWIW I did know what a drey is. Maybe the word's better know in the UK? I think it'd be a shame to lose the title. Plus it nicely sets up and works well with part about squirrel nesting in their heads.

A couple of metrical things:

I tend hear:

And you've HEARD it CALLED "The NUThouse"
which is WHY you SCUrry PAST.

Likely you want both of these as headless lines, but absent a clear strong stress at the beginning, a reader may well hear a headless line as starting with an anapaest. I could go either way on the second, I guess, but the anapaest at the beginning of the first line kind steers me to hear the same in the second

I don't really hear this as iambic tetrameter:

the drawers | full of | grand mast | er plans

I guess because iambs don't make up the majority of the feet.


......................All came to this
slow twilight at the long road's end.


Just wondered if this could be more squirrel-themed. It seems a little generic.

This confused me a little:

The feeders, filled at such a cost,
they can't forget and so remember
how it was they came to cross
the Washing Line, the Borders' Edge.
Those Rubicons which led to woods
of squirrels nesting in their heads.

So, here it's the knights that cross the washing line and the border's edge? Likely I'm over-primed by endless video of clever squirrels shimmying along washing lines commando-style to the sound of a James Bond soundtrack, so I'd expected the squirrels crossing the washing line and the borders' edges on the way to the feeders, not the garden-defending bird-feeder-protecting humans as it seems to be here. I guess, then that the knights are going outward, away from their feeders?

Incidentally, shouldn't it "Border's Edge" or "Borders' Edges"? Can multiple borders have a single edge?

At the close, I wonder if an 8 word slogan would work better, so that you get a full line of tetrameter and, to my ear, a more solid closing line. "All that we did ..."? and then maybe something like "eight short words" two lines above?

best,

Matt